A JUDGE of the NSW Supreme Court has dashed the hopes of the so-called Croatian Six in their latest attempt at a review of their conviction more than 30 years ago for a Sydney terrorist bombing plot - and of a wider circle of supporters among some 200,000 Australians of Croatian origin.

In a ruling issued just before the end-of-year judicial break, Acting Justice Graham Barr dismissed an application by three of the five surviving convicted men for a judicial review of their convictions in 1982, which resulted in 15-year jail terms that were all served, with remissions for good behaviour.

Justice Barr said the convictions stood on the evidence from NSW police that they found bomb-making materials at the homes of the six Croatian-Australian men and had obtained unsigned confessions from them.

This was despite later revelations in other cases and the 1994 Wood royal commission about abuses within the police units involved - the Armed Hold-Up Squad (commanded in this case by Roger Rogerson, later dismissed and jailed for perverting the course of justice), the Special Breaking Squad and the Special Branch - including fabricated unsigned confessions or ''verbals'', assaults, the ''loading'' of drugs, weapons or money on suspects, and perjury to enhance evidence.

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''It is not enough for a convicted person to complain, without more, that he was found guilty on the evidence of a police officer who belonged to a force in which corrupt practices existed,'' Justice Barr said. ''It is not even enough to say that an officer whose evidence led to the conviction was found to have acted corruptly on another occasion.''

Justice Barr also rejected the argument that the ''verbals'' in which five of the men allegedly confessed to the bomb plot would have been inadmissible under legal changes from 1991 requiring police interviews to be recorded electronically.

''It does not seem to me to accord with principle to regard as questionable a conviction arrived at according to law merely because the law later changes,'' he said.

Doubts relating to the long-controversial case were stirred a year ago in a Fairfax Media investigation in which a former senior federal government lawyer, Ian Cunliffe, said he knew first-hand of a conspiracy among Canberra officials to withhold intelligence information that would have resulted in ''not guilty verdicts''.

A former Balkan specialist with the US National Security Agency and now a professor at the US Naval War College, John Schindler, also said senior officials of the former Yugoslav intelligence service UDBa had told him the case was the most successful ''agent provocateur'' operation in the West, aiming at discrediting separatist movements in ethnic diasporas.